The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [61]
“You saw the statue yesterday — although, as I said, that too was a copy. I don’t know how much attention you paid to it, but I wonder if you know what the sculptor is supposed to have said when asked how he managed to create such a masterpiece. It’s such a wonderful line it would almost have to be apocryphal.
“ ‘I looked at the marble,’ Michelangelo is said to have said, ‘and I cut away the part that wasn’t David.’ That’s almost as delicious as the young Mozart explaining that musical composition is the easiest thing in the world, you have merely to write down the music you hear in your head. Who cares, really, if either of them ever said any such thing? If they didn’t, well, they ought to have done, wouldn’t you say?
“I’ve known that statue all my life. I can’t recall when I first saw it, but it must have been on my first visit to the Historical Building, and that would have been at a very early age. Our house was on Nottingham Terrace, not a ten-minute walk from the Historical Building, and I went there innumerable times as a boy. And it seems to me I always responded to the David. The stance, the attitude, the uncanny combination of strength and vulnerability, of fragility and confidence. And, of course, the sheer physical beauty of the David, the sexuality — but it was a while before I was aware of that aspect of it, or before I let myself acknowledge my awareness.
“When we all turned sixteen and got driver’s licenses, David took on new meaning in our lives. The circular drive, you see, was the lovers’ lane of choice for young couples who needed privacy. It was a pleasant parklike setting in a good part of town, unlike the few available alternatives in nasty neighborhoods down by the waterfront. Consequently, ‘going to see David’ became a euphemism for parking and making out — which, now that I think of it, are euphemisms themselves, aren’t they?
“I saw a lot of David in my late teens. The irony, of course, is that I was far more drawn to his young masculine form than to the generous curves of the young women who were my companions on those visits. I was gay, it seems to me, from birth, but I didn’t let myself know that. At first I denied the impulses. Later, when I learned to act on them — in Front Park, in the men’s room at the Greyhound station — I denied that they meant anything. It was, I assured myself, a stage I was going through.”
He pursed his lips, shook his head, sighed. “A lengthy stage,” he said, “as I seem still to be going through it. I was aided in my denial by the fact that whatever I did with other young men was just an adjunct to my real life, which was manifestly normal. I went off to a good school, I came home at Christmas and during the summer, and wherever I was I enjoyed the company of women.
“Lovemaking in those years was usually a rather incomplete affair. Girls made a real effort to remain virginal, at least in a strictly technical sense, if not until marriage then until they were in what we nowadays call a committed relationship. I don’t remember what we called it then, but I suspect it was a somewhat less cumbersome phrase.
“Still, sometimes one went all the way, and on those occasions I acquitted myself well enough. None of my partners had cause to complain. I could do it, you see, and I enjoyed it, and if it was less thrilling than what I found with male partners, well, chalk it up to the lure of the forbidden. It didn’t have to mean there was anything wrong with me. It didn’t mean I was different in any fundamental way.
“I led a normal life, Matthew. I would say I was determined to lead a normal life, but it never seemed to require much in the way of determination. During my senior year at college I became engaged